Don't have sex or you will get pregnant and die: Coach Carr told me this and for a while I believed it.

http://www.glamour.com/images/sex-love-life/2014/01/coach-carr-mean-girls-sex-ed-main.jpg

Throughtout Global Politics of the IUD Takeshita goes in depth explaining the history of the IUD.   While reading this book I could not help but be in awe over the amount of information I have failed to receive growing up.  I laugh hysterically everytime I watch the movie Mean Girls and hear Coach Carr give his sex education lesson.  He tells all of the students repeatedly not to engage in any type of sexual activity.  He then goes on to say "Okay, now everybody take some rubbers" and hands out condoms to his class.  I cannot help but laugh when I watch this because it is so ironic.  He tells them not to have sex and then goes on to hand out condoms because he knows that they will do it anyways.   On the board behind him when he is speaking there are four forms of birth control written down in the order abstinence, condom, pill, and IUD.  The first form, abstinence, is circled and is the only one talked about. Now in this case this form of abstinence only education is very exaggerated and it seems to be targeted only towards the females.  "If you have sex you will get pregnant and die" (referring to the girls in his class).  This form is directed at the females and fails to acknowledge the role that the males play.  This relates to forms of birth control.  The responsibility of birth control seems to fall into the hands of the female more often than their male counterpart.

In many cases, including mine, sexual education fails to give a lot of information to high school students.  Since our sexual education system has been mainly abstinence only many high schoolers, including myself, failed to receive information on birth control methods, They preached abstinence only and expected our parents to do the same.  What they failed to realize was that many parents (at least at my high school) relied on our sexual education class to inform us on everything that we needed to know.  If any parents were like mine, they did everything they could to avoid the "birds and the bees" talk.  So for a long time, I was under the impression that you just did not have sex until you wanted a child.  Sex meant reproduction.  Granted this was in the eighth grade when I was rather naive.  I soon came to the realization that people did not only have sex solely to reproduce, but for pleasure as well and this is when the idea of birth control was introduced to me.  Many of my friends were on the pill as early as the ninth grade of high school.  For many years, I was under the impression that besides the pill and condoms there were not any other forms of birth control.

When I had my first visit to the gynecologist I was asked so many questions and given a whole lot of information I was not expecting.  Let us keep in mind that this was at the age of sixteen years old.  My sexual education system failed me.  It was years after my sex-ed class before I was introduced to multiple methods of birth control and informed about different types of sexually transmitted diseases.  Teenagers NEED to get this information.  It is unrealistic to assume that teenagers will remain abstinent during all of their high school years.  "A 2011 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey indicates that more than 47 percent of all high school students say they have had sex, and 15 percent of high school students have had sex with four or more partners during their lifetime." (State Policies, 2016).  The statistics do not lie.  Teenagers are having sex and they need to know how to protect themselves and understand that there are options beyond the pill.  

Takeshita's book has given me an incredible amount of information on the IUD that I did not have before.  I did not even know what and IUD was until I came to college.  It is important to know the benefits and risks of devices such as an IUD and that if you do not want one there are other forms of birth control available.  When speaking in terms of high school education I believe that although teens it is absolutely necessary for teens to have access to more information about birth control, abstinence is still a form of birth control (the best form) and should not be completely cut out but included as an option not forced upon teens.  

References:

State Policies on Sex Education in Schools. (n.d.). Retrieved April 01, 2016, from http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-policies-on-sex-education-in-schools.aspx

Chikako Takeshita. (2012). The global biopolitics of the IUD. US: Mit Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhd4v